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My Talk For SMX East

I am scheduled to speak at SMX East in New York City, October 5, in the Analytics & Conversion, “Increasing Conversions Through Better Usability” afternoon session.

There are several questions I’m commonly asked by web site owners, friends or prospective clients. One of them is, “Can you prove that usability improvements increase conversions?”

Yes.

In nearly every case that comes to me for help, they don’t have a site plan. Most of the money and time are spent figuring out who to choose as a host, what domain to buy, what shopping cart and forms to install, and finding someone who can design and code it.

What is not covered in a budget are site requirements, user or software testing, functional testing, search engine optimization, social media marketing, accessibility, user experience design, web standards, and business goals.

Without consideration for the above, I typically find faulty navigation because the foundation, which is called Information Architecture, is not set up properly. They will have agonized over the style of navigation, but not whether it is guiding users, persuading anyone to follow or click, or worse, is getting their site visitors completely lost.

One smart company hired me to make sure their new proprietary application “makes sense” to its intended, future users. Their requirements gathering, way back at the start of the project, included “Must be understandable”.

If you would like to learn more, for yourself or to convince your boss or management that usability and user experience requirements will improve your bottom line, I invite you to SMX East. If you can not get there, they will be providing access to our slide shows. Contact me if you want to be alerted when they release slides.